Colony in Space Episode Four

The one where the Adjudicator turns up and is revealed to be...

Isn't it great how the Adjudicator's spaceship looks like it's being flown by a seven-year-old boy playing with his toys? It wobbles toward the surface of Uxarieus on a wavering trajectory, then turns from a spaceship into a rocket to flip up and land upright! Elon Musk would be proud!

Meanwhile, aboard the IMC ship, the colonists have taken control and set about gathering vital evidence against Dent to present to the Adjudicator. Winton finds a machine which projects giant images of lizards (complete with sound effects!), as well as the polystyrene claws that Morgan fitted to the servo robot's arms. The colonists must feel really stupid to have fallen for this kind of mummery! Even more frustrating is Winton's swift loss of control when he lets Morgan reach for a pistol in Dent's "secret compartment", and they tumble all the way back to square one.

Colony in Space Episode Three

The one where Jo gets chained to a bomb...

I've already mentioned the fact the colonists don't seem to own a razor between them (I think every single one of the men has facial shrubbery of some sort!), but I've only just noticed that the IMC staff seem to have a particular way of brushing their hair. All of them have their hair brushed forward, often into a kind of widow's peak if they don't have enough hair to go round. The colonists don't have this hairstyle, so maybe make-up supervisor Jan Harrison decided that the IMC crew would be trendier because they'd more recently come from Earth?

I also love the fact the IMC spaceship has a noticeboard. Despite it being 2472, it seems people still read memos printed on sheets of A4 paper pinned to cork boards!

Colony in Space Episode Two

The one where we meet some murderous mineralogists...

Uxarieus is a bloody grim planet, isn't it? I know it was actually a Cornish clay pit in dampest February, but it's hard to understand why the colonists ever thought they'd be able to thrive in this most depressing of environments. Ashe may have done his homework, but it's virtually impossible to believe that the land would be suitable for farming (which reminds me: we're never actually shown the colonists' farmland, we're just told about it - maybe because director Michael Briant knew it'd look silly sticking a couple of wilting runner beans into a patch of wet clay soil!). Nevertheless, the location allows for some quite impressive, sweeping shots of the "planet" when the Doctor's driving around in his little golfing kart.

The arrival of the mysterious Norton at the colony has really thrown the cat among the pigeons. As Jo sagely observes, he makes a "remarkable recovery" for saying he's been living on roots for 12 months (but looks suspiciously healthy for it), and he wastes little time in genning up on the hows and wherefores of the colony thanks to the dashing Winton's informative tour (do the men in this colony not possess razors? They're all as hairy as a Primord!). Norton seems particularly interested in the colony's power source, and when he asks whether Jim Holden is their only "electrician engineer", my suspicions were raised immediately.

Colony in Space Episode One

The one where the Third Doctor visits another planet for the first time...

The opening scene of this story is both marvellous and frustrating. We zoom through space and home in on what would appear to be the Doctor's homeworld (yet to be named) where we meet three Time Lords in splendid robes. This is theoretically very exciting, because we all know how terrifying the Time Lords are (except for that bumbling bowler-hatted chap in Terror of the Autons). It's quite a refreshing revelation to have them send the exiled Doctor on a mission for them ("We must restore his freedom, as long as it serves our purpose"), but they reveal too much plot, and needlessly.

The fault can only be writer Malcolm Hulke's, who basically tells the viewer that Roger Delgado's going to turn up as the Master again, and that he has plans for something called a "doomsday weapon" (in fact, the very first words of the story are: "The Master..."). After this scene ends, there is no further reference to the doomsday weapon, and the Master does not appear. Why oh why didn't the production team hold back the involvement of the Master until his actual appearance later in the story? And why mention something that then becomes totally irrelevant to the rest of the episode? It all seems a bit ham-fisted to me.

The Claws of Axos Episode Four

The one where the Doctor pretends to betray the entire Earth...

"The claws of Axos are already deeply embedded in the Earth's carcass!" says the Doctor at one point. It's always great to hear a story title spoken by a character in the fiction, even if it is in a rather contrived way such as this!

At the top of the episode the Doctor and Jo are struggling to escape Axos, and Jo appears to have the mother of all panic attacks as the confusion floods her mind. She's hysterical, and there was a moment where I really did think the Doctor was going to give her one of those classic Hollywood slaps across the face to "knock some sense into her". But no, not even the Third Doctor would do that. Such unnecessary violence is largely confined to the 21st century series, where it seems to be a rule that every companion gets to slap the Doctor at some point (except when the Doctor's a lady).

The Claws of Axos Episode Three

The one where Jo is almost aged to death, and the Master breaks into the Doctor's TARDIS...

This is a surprisingly Doctor-lite episode considering the Axons' invasion of Earth is underway and things are spiralling out of control. Right from the start, the Doctor and Jo are taken back to Axos as prisoners, and the Doctor spends most of the episode being questioned. Poor old Katy Manning, meanwhile, barely gets anything to say or do, although the scene where Axos ages Jo is quite startling (older actress Mildred Brown looks thoroughly browned off!).

To save his friend from being aged to death by Axos, the Doctor agrees to provide the secret of time travel. Axos is able to unlock the block that the Time Lords put on the Doctor's memory, and so he can project the correct equation and power applications for them. If any budding quantum scientist wants to try and invent time travel for real, they need look no further than The Claws of Axos episode 3 - it's all there! But why does Axos need the Doctor to do its calculations for it? Surely as soon as it knows the equation and power application, it can work out the effect the full output of the Nuton complex would have for itself?

The Claws of Axos Episode Two

The one where the Doctor makes things ten times worse...

Chinn really is very annoying, isn't he? For some reason he has become the face of the British Government, who otherwise show very little interest in what's going on, despite the obvious enormous repercussions. An alien spaceship has landed on British shores and is offering a miraculous deal which may completely change the course of progress on planet Earth, but all HM Government does is give self-important pen-pusher Chinn "special powers" and leave him to it.

Granted, the minister who speaks to Chinn on the phone warns him that he is their "man on the spot", but to invest so much responsibility and importance in one civil servant is both bonkers and unrealistic. Writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin are really stretching credulity here! Also, Chinn's "special powers" (under the Emergency Powers Act) appear to give him the right to command the regular British Army and get them to arrest the Brigadier and UNIT's men, and subsequently prohibit them from contacting the outside world, or indeed UNIT HQ in Geneva! It's utterly preposterous.